Gearing up for @SpringOne2GX. (It’s not too late to register!)

By Greg Turnquist

Greg L. Turnquist worked on the Spring team for over thirteen years and is a senior staff technical content engineer at Cockroach Labs. He was the lead for Spring Data JPA and Spring Web Services. He wrote Packt's best-selling title, Learning Spring Boot 2.0 2nd Edition, and its 3rd Edition follow-up along many others.

September 2, 2014

DSC05391This is a short week for US citizens, since this past Monday was Labor Day. Of course, while I took time off, it didn’t really save me from the fact that I still have a boat load of stuff to do before I fly off to Dallas this upcoming Sunday.

I look forward to seeing many colleagues face-to-face. It’s a great time of cameraderie. And it’s also one of the most heating times of the year when we want to get certain things released to the Spring community.

I’ve been working primarily on two teams this past year: Spring Data and the Allspark team. Primarily I have worked on Spring Data REST, a project that lets you export any Spring Data repo with powerful RESTful endpoints supported by hypermedia. I have also made significant contributions on converting all their reference docs to asciidoctor. (Stay tuned for more on that).

At the same time, I have been using my RESTful skills and knowledge to interact with the Allspark team. This group is focused on a mobile R&D. As people are becoming aware, not only is software consuming the world, but mobile is consuming the software world. With billions of mobile devices in circulation, many businesses deal with mobile traffic as a primary means for lots of customers.

spring-a-gram-catRESTful services are a key facet to developing mobile apps, so I have used Spring Data REST to bridge the gap between Spring Data and mobile interfaces by building a demo application. Roy Clarkson and I will be demonstrating it next week. The app is called Spring-a-Gram and has been developed to move as much development as possible off of the server and onto the client.

In our demo, I’ll show an iPhone mobile web app that can take pictures and upload them to a backend database. Then it will let you tweet links to all your friends. Roy will demo an Android app that does similar things. All the while, it showcases the power of Spring Data REST and hypermedia.

My goal that I am trying to accomplish this week is to get the latest Spring Data GA release into my demo so I can show of the new ALPS metadata. This will be a signature achievement, because it will remove the need for a client developer to actually peek at the apps domain model. Instead, one can interrogate the RESTful service purely with a tool like curl and figure out how to a interact with the backend.

At the same time, I’m polishing up the getting started guides so that readers can skip over the build steps and jump right to the content. The process of putting such dynamic features into an asciidoctor-based guide was quite enlightening. I wrote JavaScript, CSS, and HTML and learned a lot of really fascinating things. I just can’t wait to gather with my colleagues and have a toast to this past year’s work!

If you happen to be coming (it’s not too late to register!!!!), send me a tweet or a message on this blog site. I’m trying to gather notes on all the people I plan to link up with. (In the meantime, I’ve told my editor for Learning Spring Boot that I’m basically unavailable to work on rewrites for the next two weeks.)

Happing coding!

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